


A Numerical List of Things That Happened to Sapphique

by Ori_Cat



Category: Incarceron Series - Catherine Fisher
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Implied/Referenced Torture, Mortality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-25
Updated: 2017-07-25
Packaged: 2018-12-06 16:50:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11604807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ori_Cat/pseuds/Ori_Cat
Summary: Please see title.





	A Numerical List of Things That Happened to Sapphique

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ThornedDream](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThornedDream/gifts).



0\. He never was. Sapphique is a title, not a name. The people of the Prison desire freedom and they desire the stars so they anthropomorphize those desires and those hopes and out of them they create a man, with dark hair and dark eyes and wings rainbowed like oil on water, and they say he has Escaped. And they believe, so firmly, but that doesn’t make any of it real. 

1\. He dies. The Prison is a broken world, scored by disease and fighting; there is not and has never been enough food enough water enough space – and under those conditions that’s what humans do, they die. (Under those conditions? Under all conditions, rather. The thing about humans is, they don’t live forever, so you can wait and watch them as long as you want – you can be ordered to – but eventually, there will be no-one left that you love.) 

The stories come later, because people will always find stories to tell and it doesn’t really matter who they’re about. Who they’re about is just an excuse. 

2\. He fails. The stories are true, to an extent, he fights and lies and preaches and wanders all the paths of sky and earth searching for the stars. And eventually, the Prison gets tired of this, and it closes its jaws upon him and Sapphique is dead. A hero, maybe, but that has never availed much to the heroes, has it? 

3\. He lives. The Prison never kills him and oh, that is the tragedy here. Humans can live through a lot, you know – some have been buried under tons of snow, fallen hundreds of feet, they don’t need all their limbs, all their organs, all their _brains_ to survive sometimes - and it finds overkill distasteful, so he lives, but. 

There is, in the depths of the Prison, a single room, whose access no-one but the Prison knows, and in that room is an – altar? – formed of a single slab of stone, and two cracks run through it. And there Incarceron binds Sapphique its son, its only son, whom it loves, as a sacrifice from itself to itself and as revenge upon him. And with him it leaves its Beetles with their acid (in lieu of serpents) and its Rats with their teeth (in lieu of eagles), and it never repeats the mistakes of its forerunners, for each day it repairs the stone so that it can never grind away and set him free whom it has chained. 

And Sapphique lives, for the Prison never kills him, and his struggles shake the world. 

4\. Sometimes, though, those who wish for things do get them, and so he wins. He wins, he does find that one bolthole and steps out through it and there are the stars like a thousand crystals cast through the sky, in all their light and majesty over the silent earth. Silent, but not empty, for there are people there, free, who know nothing of the Prison beyond rumours and who – 

I’m sorry, did I say free? For they are not. They are imprisoned just as strongly by poverty and the foolish rules of the Realm. And that is just how the world is, they say. It cannot be changed and it cannot be fled from. We are a little island in the vastness of space, they say, and we have all suffered from the Wars of Wrath, and this is the price we pay for safety, they say. And Sapphique understands that this is true. 

Half a day’s walk from the mountainside with the charred circle, through the forests of the Realm, there is a river, and it runs through a gorge dark and deep and filled with spray. And Sapphique comes to stand at the edge of that gorge, on a night with no moon, and he casts into the waters below one of his boots, and the blue-grey-silver piece of yarn he retrieved from the Justices as compensation for his right hand, and a stone picked up from the riverbank, and his other boot. And he spreads wings of shimmering light, rainbowed like oil on water, and steps off himself – but wings made of light do not catch, and again he falls and is broken on the rocks below. 

The next day and a couple miles down the river, two pig farmers will find what used to be a man, with dark hair and dark eyes, half-lying on the bank, and their village will lay him in their potter’s field and wonder who he was. 

( _Someone who got what he wished for,_ is the answer.) 

5\. He wins. He wins and he Escapes and he finds the Realm to be just another Prison, so he flees from that one too. The earth is large and contains vast lands where the Realm’s power does not extend, and it must contain peoples that power does not touch either. And maybe he finds them there, maybe he finds that freedom can exist in this universe under the ruined moon. 

6\. Did you not hear him say? Yes, he Escapes. And he finds there is no freedom in the Realm either. So he repairs his wings, builds them anew of feathers from the birds and wood fallen in the forest, metal stripping off crumbling buildings and hope from himself, and flies away to the stars. He is a hero, and they do not have the luxury of giving up on their quests. And he leaves a promise to return, and maybe, someday, he does. 

7\. All of the above.


End file.
